Proxy (18 page)

Funny that she really believed in her own value so highly, thought Syd. It must be a patron thing. In the Valve, you learned fast and you learned young that no one’s life was worth all that much to anyone else.

“They killed you once already,” he reminded Marie. “And for dumber reasons than a delinquent proxy on the run.”

“That was different,” she said, though her voice was quiet. “I wasn’t really dead. Medical teams were standing by. We just told Knox I’d died.”

Knox looked at her with his mouth hanging open. She described what she’d done to him like she’d snubbed him at a party or spread a nasty rumor, not like she’d torn open his life.

“I was doing it for a good reason,” Marie added. “That counts for something.”

Knox seethed and Syd worried he was about to punch the girl. If she didn’t have the EMD stick, Knox might have.

“I know what to do,” Syd told them. “And it’s something you two are good at.”

Knox and Marie looked at each other, neither of them certain what Syd meant.

Syd hopped out of the car to try to get the engine started again. “We’re going to have a crash.”

[26]

THE LUXURY TRANSPO WASN’T like the vehicles Syd was used to fixing and its system had completely shut down. Everything in its engine was computer regulated and the battery cells were more complex than any he’d ever seen before. They had to be solar powered, but their distribution was controlled by a processor that he couldn’t access.

After ten minutes, the only thing he’d actually accomplished was opening the engine compartment and staring at it.

With every minute that passed, he imagined Guardians closing in on Mr. Baram. Trashing his shop. Terrifying all those children. “Neutralizing” him before their eyes.

All because of Syd.

“It’s just a machine,” he told himself. “Fix it.”

He looked around. The road was wide and smooth. Lights as bright as day shone down from the fence. It wasn’t safe to be stopped like this on the restricted speedway. There were all kinds of security to make sure that none of the Lower City people got up here. It was a patrons-only road.

He wondered if he was the first citizen of the Valve ever to set foot on this road. He wondered if he’d ever get off it alive.

He tapped his finger on the birthmark behind his ear, trying to figure out a way around all the complicated programming.

“So you’re saying you can’t fix it?” Knox appeared beside him, looking down into the mess of wires and motors and pistons that drove the fancy machine across the fancy roads.

Syd thought back to Tom in school the morning before, standing in the hallway, asking Syd the same question. He couldn’t fix Tom’s projector and he couldn’t fix this car. He couldn’t fix anything lately. All he seemed capable of doing was breaking things.

“No one can fix these things,” Marie said. “They’re designed to be secure.”

Knox smirked at her, a braggy smile that wasn’t nearly as cute as Knox probably thought it was. “And I’m designed to break security,” he said.

He pulled out the AR glasses that he’d brought along, congratulating himself for his foresight. While the other two watched his hands dance in the air, he brought up the schematics for an engine just like the one in front of Syd. For a moment, he thought he should have used a holo projection instead of doing this in his lenses. What good was performing a brilliant hack, if only he could see it?

“I just unlocked the security on the power source.” Knox smiled. “That help?”

Syd leaned back into the engine case and saw that he could now change the circuit running from the batteries. A few wires moved and the car had power to its driveshaft again. It roared to life.

Knox patted Syd on the back. “We’re a pretty good team.”

Syd didn’t answer. He didn’t appreciate the smugness when it was Knox’s stupidity that got him into all this. If Knox had just left his father’s car alone, Syd would be lying down in the back of the shop right now, listening to the Chang family’s arguments and daydreaming about Atticus Finch. Well, maybe not
him
anymore. But someone.

No more daydreaming now.

“Stand back,” he said. He leaned in to the engine, flipped a switch, and jumped backward as the transpo lurched away with a screech, directly into the fence. A shower of sparks shot up as it crashed itself into the blast barrier. Metal tore, glass shattered, and Syd noticed Knox and Marie flinch. The sound must have been a painful reminder for them. The thought made Syd happy.

He shouldn’t be the only one suffering here.

“Won’t the crash tell them we’re here?” Marie asked.

“Yeah,” said Syd. “But they already know.”

He pointed up the road. A low-flying drone dropped beneath the smog line and circled. A heavy transport wound its way down the mountain road from above, its lights blazing. Another rumbled up from below. Both of them filled with Guardians.

“We won’t be staying long.” Syd grabbed Marie’s upper arm, yanking her over the ruined fence so hard that she stumbled. “You’re the hostage, right? We have to give them a show.”

“You could always knock her out,” Knox suggested.

Marie mouthed a curse at him. Syd ignored both of them. He really didn’t care about their argument. He needed to make sure Mr. Baram was okay and he needed to escape. The patron kids’ issues didn’t matter to him at all. The patron kids didn’t matter to him at all either, except that keeping them close kept the drone above from killing him from the sky.

Syd climbed over the broken barrier and picked his way down the garbage-strewn hill, hauling Marie beside him. Knox followed. He didn’t even act like he was a hostage. He could picture his father on the living room couch, watching a holo of the three of them and seething. He wanted his father to know that he’d picked sides.

When Syd reached the first alley between a row of shacks, he heard Marie breathing in his ear. Knox stood on the other side of him. The heat from both their bodies radiated against his back.

“You don’t need to stand so close to me,” he said.

There were advos on the side of every building, even the shacks made of discarded plastic and tin. They moved and changed, chanted, sang, changed volume, competing for attention. There were too many people down here, with too many marketing profiles, no private streams, no privacy controls. Everyone’s wants were on loud display. Knox’s head turned at every noise. He’d never heard such chaos of data. Beneath it all, there was the murmur of other voices, human, spoken in shouts and in whispers.

“Is it, like . . . safe for us down here?” Knox asked.

“Nope,” said Syd and started off again, jumping over a nasty-looking puddle of green wastewater. He heard a splash behind him and Knox cursed.

Eyes watched them from behind tin doors and plastic curtains. It wouldn’t take long before the entire Valve knew that Syd, who’d been hauled off by the Guardians, was back and had two patrons with him. The security firms would be drooling over a reward that couldn’t possibly be as big as they were imagining. Still, they’d be getting their kill teams ready.

“People
live
like this?” Knox said as they turned down another alley, passed some open-pit latrines, and skirted a syntholene flophouse, where dead-eyed addicts groaned in the shadows and some Maes goons whispered to one another and pointed at Syd. He heard bird whistles back and forth across the low rooftops.

In the Valve, there were no birds.

Three men were coming toward them down the narrow alley from the opposite direction. They were large, with long, braided hair and patchwork clothes. They weren’t part of any organized unit, but a lynch mob could be just as deadly as an army if you were their target. Even the advos on the walls around them were threatening: snuff holos, weapon sales, cut-rate scar removal. The advos surged forward with them, like an oncoming tsunami.

“Hey,
bwana,
big
gota,
” one of them called, holding up his fist as he approached. The dialect wasn’t one Syd knew. The man wanted more than a friendly fist-bump, though. In his other hand, he held a large rusted pipe. The other two were similarly armed. Two other guys had moved into the narrow alley behind them, coming up fast.

“I don’t like this,” Knox whispered.

Although they saw only the three men in front and the two behind, there were at least a hundred eyes on them. If they stopped moving, they’d be mobbed in seconds. Of course, to collect the reward, whoever killed Syd would need to collect his body. With all the competition, that wouldn’t be easy. Syd needed to be off the street before someone came up with an idea on how to do that.

The three men rushed forward. Syd turned at the first intersecting alley, yanking Knox and Marie behind him by their shirts. He turned again, doubled back. They started running. The Valve was a maze, even for the people who lived there, but Syd knew the way home well enough.

“Stay close,” he warned. As if Knox or Marie needed to be told.

“Where you running, little swampcat?” someone called out. Syd didn’t look back, didn’t even slow down.

As they turned another corner, a tiny leg shot out of the shadows, tripping Syd. Knox and Marie stumbled over him and they all fell into a brackish pink puddle.

An arrow sliced overhead and a hard-looking woman in a maroon SafeCo uniform stood at the other end of the alley with a crossbow raised. She cursed at her miss and took aim again, when four children jumped her, tackling her into the mud. Marie winced as the woman received a savage beating from a mob of children. She looked away. The sun was just beginning to rise.

The little one who’d tripped them waved for Syd to follow. He led them through a shack where a family was huddled in a corner, eating some kind of boiled leafy thing. The family didn’t even look up as they ran through. They followed through several more shacks, each darker and smokier and stinkier than the last. Just when Knox didn’t think he could take anymore, they reached the back of a low concrete building.

Before Syd reached the door to his old workroom, it cracked open and he saw the white puff of his boss’s beard and the shine of light off his glasses.

“Ah, boychik, you’ve got yourself in a pickle now, eh? Come inside.”

Syd and Knox and Marie slipped inside and Mr. Baram shut the door, snapping heavy bolts into place. The children didn’t follow. They’d already dissolved back into the impossible chaos of the Valve at dawn.

“You’re in danger,” Syd blurted immediately. “You have to get out of here. They’re coming for you.”

“Please, Sydney, we don’t forget our manners,” Mr. Baram answered him, with an exasperating calm. “Introduce your friends.”

“There’s no time, Mr. Baram,” Syd cried. “Didn’t you hear me? They’re coming for you and it’s my fault. I’m so sorry.”

Mr. Baram rested his hand on Syd’s shoulder and looked into his eyes. “They’ve been coming for me for a long time,” he said. “And it’s no one’s fault but mine. I should have told you sooner.”

“Told me what?” Syd felt like a little boy again, like the boy in the orphanage who didn’t understand why he had to be punished and who couldn’t stop crying, who just wanted the hurting to stop. Now, he just wanted Mr. Baram to tell him what was going on now and, somehow, to make it stop.

“About who you really are,” Mr. Baram said. “And why you have to die.”

[27]

THE OLD MAN SERVED them some flavored soda to calm their nerves. It tasted like dirt to Knox.

“Fresh berries,” Mr. Baram explained.

“Like, organic?” Knox shuddered to think of it. He set the mug down.

Organic.

The word conjured up disease and poverty, the riot of jungles and the desolation of deserts. City life was designed, organized, clean, and controlled. Knox loved that about it. It was completely human. Nature produced nothing but death, disease, and destruction. He didn’t like the idea of putting it inside his body.

Marie watched Knox set his cup down and grunted. She took a loud sip, Knox was sure, just to make him mad.

Mr. Baram eased himself back onto a stool across from the three of them and looked at Syd sadly. Knox wondered why his father would want a man like this dead. The old man couldn’t be any kind of threat to the SecuriTech empire. His shop was filled with junk. It was a nasty, squat little building in a stinking street in the slums.

“I really don’t understand,” said Syd. He sounded so much more fragile than he had before, so much younger. “Why do they want me dead? I didn’t do anything.”

“No, you didn’t.” Mr. Baram sucked his teeth and turned to look Knox up and down. “So, this is your patron? He doesn’t look like much.”

“He’s not,” said Syd, without looking at Knox.

“I am actually a—” Knox started to object, but he glanced at one of the holos on the wall that showed a crowd gathered in front of the building. Men, woman, children, many of them armed, some of them desperate, and all of them poor, loitered about, watching the building. Knox figured he should stay on Mr. Baram’s good side. The old man was his only protection. Patrons did not belong down here. He shut his mouth.

“It is an amazing thing that you’ve brought him here,” Mr. Baram told Syd. “Enough to restore an old man’s faith. I see the hand of destiny in it.”

“Not this mystical stuff again,” Syd objected.

“Oh no,” said Mr. Baram. “Nothing mystical about destiny. Destiny is just the inevitable result of choice, from the choices that came before us to the choices we make. They are a river that can only flow in one direction.”

“You’re talking some deep craziness now,” said Syd. “And we don’t have time for it. Knox’s father wants both of us dead.”

“I wasn’t honest with you this afternoon, Sydney.” Mr. Baram took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt. “I suspected something like this was coming. I did my best to make arrangements quickly, but I fear I wasn’t quick enough.”

“What? What did you suspect? What kind of arrangements?” Syd thought back to the previous afternoon, to Mr. Baram’s worried cigarette in the alley, his blathering on about the Holy Land and goat herders and whatever.